If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.

But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that.

You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care.

The biggest mistake is an over-reliance on data. Managers will say if there are no data they can take no action. However, data only exist about the past. By the time data become conclusive, it is too late to take actions based on those conclusions.

The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.

If you want to make better theory, you've got to use the best that's available and look through the lens of another discipline to see if you can uncover more anomalies. By looking at the phenomena of failure from the perspective of sales, marketing, finance, general management, and the equity markets, I was able to see things that Rebecca [Henderson] hadn't.